• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

33 Charts

  • About
    • What is 33 Charts?
    • Bryan Vartabedian MD
    • Sponsorship
  • Blog
  • 33mail
  • Foci
    • Social/Public Media
    • Physicians
    • Patients
    • Hospitals
    • Information
    • Process/Flow
    • Technology
    • Digital culture
    • Future Medicine
  • The Public Physician
Future Medicine, Technology

Digital Stethoscopes: Analog Dressed for Digital

March 4, 2015 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: < 1 minute

stethoscopeIn the late 90’s I was pursued by a start-up that was using web-based audio for physician dictations. Doctors would record, ladies would type, and the web sat in between. During an expensive dinner with the company’s leadership I asked how this was different from recording on a dictaphone.  I was met with a broad veneered smile and the incredulous reply, “C’mon Dr. V….this is The Internet.”  The bubble popped and the company was insolvent a few months later.

Fast forward to 2015.  We’re still looking for new ways to do old things.  A new digital stethoscope records a child’s chest sounds that can be shared with her doctor.  From Fast Company Co.Exist.

The stethoscope is more interesting. A round disc linked to a phone with a cord, it records a sound file from a patient’s chest and creates a history on the phone. Parents can then interpret the sound themselves to get a sense of whether they should be getting professional attention. A whistling sound, for example, might indicate an asthma flare-up; a crackling noise would point to pneumonia.

19th century auscultation retrofitted for a mobile world.  Analog diagnostics dressed for a digital party.

For sure, technology will ultimately allow patients and parents to perform a lot of what now requires a trip to the clinic.  And while stories of cribside diagnosis plays well to a hungry media, disruption will only come when diagnostics become precise, sensitive, and amenable to front-line, screening AI.  Real change will come when we graduate from the empiric interpretation of noises echoing from body cavities.

Until then, old technology on new devices won’t move the chains.

Related Articles

  • EKGs and Artificial Unintelligence
  • Innovation Extinction
  • When Technology Gets Ahead of HHS

Tagged With: Stethoscope

Related Articles

  • EKGs and Artificial Unintelligence
  • Innovation Extinction
  • When Technology Gets Ahead of HHS

Primary Sidebar

Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian is a pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine / Texas Children’s Hospital and one of health care’s influential voices on technology & medicine.
Learn More

Popular Articles

  • The Fate of Fired Cleveland Clinic Resident Lara Kollab
  • Cures Act Final Rule – How It Will Change Medicine
  • 12 Things About Doximity You Probably Didn’t Know
  • Should Physicians Give Their Cell Phone Number to Patients?
  • Doximity Dialer Video – Telemedicine’s Latest Power Player

Sign up for 33mail newsletter

The most interesting stuff in medicine curated each week

Featured Articles

Health Care and the Visibility-Value Continuum

The Case for New Physician Literacies in the Digital Age

Reactive and Creative Spaces

100,000 Connected Lemmings

Doctors and social media: Damned if you engage, damned if you don’t

  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Footer

What is 33 Charts?

With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

Founded in 2009 as a center of community and thought leadership for the issues doctors face in a digital world, 33 charts was included in the National Library of Medicine permanent web archive in 2014.
Learn More

Foci

  • Digital culture
  • Digital Health
  • EHR/Health IT
  • Future Medicine
  • Hospitals
  • Information
  • Patients
  • Physicians
  • Process/Flow
  • Quality
  • Social/Public Media
  • Technology

Copyright © 2022 · 33 Charts · Terms · Privacy